Seth Rogen Understands Why People Might Try to Make Fun of Him in Steve Jobs

Even as Seth Rogen was on the set of Steve Jobs playing Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, his name became associated with technology for a different, not-remotely-welcome reason. His comedy The Interview had incited the wrath of North Korea, and Sony Pictures was being hacked in the fallout, with millions of e-mails being dumped online—including plenty of Rogen’s own.

“I was actually shocked that after all my correspondence with the studio came out publicly that there was nothing I was really that ashamed of,” Rogen says now, nearly a year after what he calls “by far the most difficult professional thing I’ve ever had to deal with.” Rogen didn’t get pilloried for his e-mails the way others did, but didn’t get celebrated for them the way Channing Tatum did, either. “I would never send an e-mail that positive to the studio,” Rogen swears.

Steve Jobs may be perceived as Rogen’s biggest challenge yet, stepping into a star-studded cast, going toe-to-toe with Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs, reading Aaron Sorkin’s words, and taking direction from Danny Boyle. But like his old friend and collaborator Jason Segel, who played David Foster Wallace in this year’s The End of the Tour, Rogen said it was the idea of how his work would be perceived that intimidated him more than doing the work itself. “I just knew that if I tried to do this and it went really poorly, then it just could not have been worse . . . that type of thing people would just love to tear apart, you know.”

And as Rogen sees it, “I’m someone people like to tear apart anyway”—maybe not as much as during the cultural ubiquity of Knocked Up, but it’s still there. “I was just aware that I would have made fun of me if I could have,” Rogen says. “If I saw another actor like me doing this movie and turning out really poorly, I would have been mocking with my friend.”

Happily for Rogen and everyone else involved, Steve Jobs has turned out quite well, and even has a high-profile fan in none other than Steve Wozniak. The day before we spoke, Rogen had appeared with Wozniak on The Tonight Show, and the two have done a handful of interviews together, a partnership Rogen calls “completely unexpected.” He was told by Boyle not to specifically imitate Wozniak in any way, and Rogen swears he didn’t think about the pressure of playing a real person until after the film was finished—and when he found out Wozniak liked the film. “It’s kind of like a bullet I dodged that I didn’t even know it was being fired at me,” Rogen says. “I didn’t even think about it. I was like, ‘Oh, man, he could have hated it.’ ”